Monthly Archives: November 2014

The piece below is reprinted from The Plough and the Stars blog, here; all I can add is my disgust that the Miriam Daly mural has been painted out of existence

No doubt the anti-revisionist message of the iconic Vol Miriam Daly memorial mural now painted over on Oakman Street, West Belfast today was lost on Provisional Sinn Fein on the very day they publicly eulogised arch-bigot Paisley, yet appear to be attempting to revise out the the role and memory of British death-squad victim, Irish Republican Socialist activist, Miriam Daly.

A local IRSP member approached those responsible asking why they were painting over the mural and was given the rather spurious excuse that there was ‘graffiti’ at the street level area of the mural. The IRSP member stated that this hardly warranted the total erasing of the entire mural!

The eyesore that has hastily replaced the Miriam Daly memorial mural. Not surprisingly, its message seems to reinforce individualism, alienation and powerlessness.

Miriam Daly, a respected academic, a leading co-founder of the then nascent RACs/H-Block/Armagh Committees was slain by an undercover British death-squad on the 26th June 1980, in the most horrific of circumstances. The death-squad gunmen who callously murdered Miriam Daly, bound the mother of three and then waited at her home in Andersonstown, hoping to also murder her fellow IRSP and H-Blocks’ activist husband, Jim, who they were expecting to return from work. However, on that tragic day, June 26th 1980, Jim was in Dublin attending a German language course and it is assumed that when the British death-squad realised that he would not be returning, they shot Miriam dead before making good their escape. The Daly children discovered their murdered mother when they Read the rest of this entry →

The 3rd Annual Frank Conroy Commemoration was a huge success with a large crowd, including councillors Joanne Pender and Mark Lynch, attending the event at the Republican memorial in Kildare town, on Sunday 9 November.

Stewart Reddin (Stoneybater and Smithfield Peoples History Project) introduced Kildare historian and author James Durney. Durney spoke about the search that located Conroy’s birthplace in Kilcullen. Conroy died in 1936 while fighting with the International Brigade defending the Spanish Republic.

He was born on 25 February 1914, in Kilcullen, Co. Kildare. His parents were Michael Conroy (born in Co. Laois) and Catherine Farrell (born in Co. Dublin). They were married in Dublin South in 1908. Michael Conroy was a baker by trade and moved his family to Co. Kildare, probably for employment reasons, as there was a large bakery, O’Connell’s, operating in Kilcullen.

Durney said, “Frank Conroy, a former IRA volunteer and a member of the Communist Party, left for Spain on the Dun Laoghaire-Holyhead ferry on 13 December 1936 with about twenty-five other Irish volunteers of the International Brigade, including Republican Frank Ryan. Within days six of them would be dead including Conroy.”

Spanish civil war historian Harry Owens was the main speaker at the commemoration. He noted “that socialist Fr O’Flanagan (a relation of Ming Flanagan, MEP) who read the prayer that opened that first independent Irish Parliament, also stood here in Kildare in 1935, one year before the Spanish civil war, when he inaugurated this monument to seven workers shot Read the rest of this entry →